A Constellation Name
by Colubrina
Summary: It had been one night and Draco Malfoy had gone out of his way to make sure she didn't expect it to be any more than that. Still, she probably should have told him about their daughter. DRAMIONE. (Plus drabbles of their child.)
1. Chapter 1

Hermione watched the girl as she stuck her tongue out, lost in her book, and thought, not for the first time, that only the Malfoys would have white blonde hair that wasn't a recessive trait. Trust their arrogance to extend down into their very DNA. In temperament the child was hers. She'd raised her alone, and both nurture and nature had combined to create a girl who echoed her mother in her interests, her talents, her very personality.

She looked, however, just like Draco. Nearly white hair fell in a straight line over pale skin and grey eyes. If she'd looked like her mother maybe it would have been easier, maybe Ron would have been able to forgive one night of drunken, devil-may-care sex. Or maybe not. Hermione supposed it didn't matter. He and Lavender had their hoard of loud, ginger hooligans who pushed one another off brooms while hooting with laughter, and she had one quiet girl who only pulled her nose out of a book to issue barked orders that other children ignored.

Imogen Granger hadn't had a lot of friends at primary, and Hermione suspected that would continue at Hogwarts. She'd almost hoped the girl wouldn't get a letter, that she'd be a squib and thus spared her father's legacy.

"It'll be fine," Harry said. He pulled a chair up and joined her at her table at the ice cream parlour, cone in each hand. "She'll be fine. You worry too much."

Hermione took the cone he handed her but her eyes never left her daughter. She'd spent eleven years avoiding bringing the girl into public, worried that hair would brand her as surely as her father had been branded on his arm. The Weasleys bit their tongues and pretended Draco had never existed and that Imogen was the result of some kind of spontaneous, virgin birth which had oddly coincided with Ron and Hermione's break up. Harry loved her because she was Hermione's. The rest of their world was unlikely to be as kind.

Plus, of course, now Draco would find out.

She'd never told him. She would have, she supposed, if he hadn't grimaced the morning after their tryst, if he hadn't said alcohol made men do foolish things and he hoped she didn't think this meant anything. She might have, if he hadn't seen her at about five months gone and said she'd been getting fat and was that why Weasley had dumped her ugly arse? She'd even written him half a letter once, filled with angry, hateful comments about how he had the most beautiful daughter a person could want and that he'd missed everything - _everything_ \- because he was such a rotten, miserable prat and couldn't manage to say one nice thing ever, not even after a night of sex, and she hoped he was alone and unhappy and lonely and that no one ever so much as owled him and she hadn't been fat!

She'd burnt it at that point.

She really had no idea what he'd been up to. Maybe he was married. Maybe he had a son, some perfect little Malfoy to carry on his family's awful legacy of hate and intolerance. Maybe he spent every afternoon teaching his legitimate child how to fly, steady hands holding him on a child's broom until the child he'd wanted could soar across the back lawn of that horrible Manor, shrieking with joy that he'd done it.

Harry had tried to teach Imogen to fly. It had not gone well.

"It will be fine," Harry said again. "She's her mother's daughter. She'll take to Hogwarts the same way you did. We'll probably have to go pry her out of the library come spring."

"She's also her father's daughter," Hermione said as softly as she could so Imogen, who often appeared to be absorbed in books while she eavesdropped on adults, wouldn't overhear. "People may be… unpleasant"

"Then she can tell them off," Harry said. "She called Rose a stuck-up flatiron last weekend."

"What does that even mean?" Hermione asked. "A flatiron?"

Harry just shrugged. Kids came up with the dumbest ways to insult each other as far as he could tell, and Imogen gave back as good as she got. "Eat that," he said, "before it all melts."

. . . . . . . . . .

Draco caught sight of the bushy hair and wished there were a way he could turn and go the other direction without being obvious about it. He hardly ever left the Manor and hadn't since the war and it would figure that the one day he decided to go to Diagon Alley, Hermione Granger would be there.

He'd meant to write to her. He had. When he'd woken up and seen her there in his bed, hand tucked under one cheek and knees pulled up, he'd panicked. This wasn't a woman who'd ever want him. Whatever had happened, however she'd made such a series of bad decisions she'd ended up here, wasn't likely to happen again. He'd opened his mouth and rejected her before she could do the same to him, and it was only when he saw the flare of hurt in her eyes, a flare she'd covered so quickly most men would have missed it, that he realized the arsehole in the room was him.

By then, of course, it had been too late. She'd pulled her clothes on and assured him that he didn't need to worry his pretty, pureblood head that she'd come 'round begging for more of his attention, attention that hadn't been all that magnificent, since they were being blunt.

So he'd meant to write and apologize, but he hadn't because how does one phrase, 'Sorry I was such an arse after we spent the night screwing one another's brains out' in such a way to not offend? It seemed impossible. Then he'd seen her, months later, and, rather than make things better, he'd tried to find out whether the rumors that she and Weasley had ended things were true, and had done it in the worst way imaginable.

He'd avoided her ever since.

He squared his shoulders and walked briskly in the direction he'd been headed, past the ice cream shop to the bookstore. He'd just nod his head at her, and at Potter, and be on his way like a civil adult.

Then the girl sitting with Granger looked up from her book and the light hit her hair and he stopped and stared into his own eyes.

"What the fuck is this?" came out of his mouth, continuing his long tradition of always saying the absolute worst thing possible when he was around Hermione Granger.

. . . . . . . . .

"What the fuck is this?"

Hermione almost pulled her wand. Draco Malfoy had come up behind her and, naturally, the first words out of his mouth - the first words he ever said _to his daughter_ \- made her want to kill him.

"Get bent, Malfoy," Harry said. He'd half-stood in his seat and turned, as if he could put himself between Imogen and her father. "No one wants you here."

Draco just put a hand on Harry's shoulder and shoved him to the side and stared more intently at the pointy girl staring back at him. She thrust her jaw out in a mannerism Hermione knew echoed her own, but which made the tiniest of smiles begin to emerge on Draco Malfoy's equally pointy face. He pulled his eyes off his daughter just long enough to throw Hermione a look of furious malice and hurt.

"I should have told you," she began.

He had turned away from her again and held his hand out to Imogen. "I'm Draco Malfoy," he said. "You must be going to Hogwarts this year."

Imogen crossed her arms and didn't take the proffered hand, a rejection that didn't seem to faze Draco at all. He just pulled out a seat and sat down.

"How do you know how old I am?" Imogen demanded.

"I'm quite good at sums," Draco said and Hermione flinched. "Do you know which House you want to be Sorted into?"

Imogen looked at Hermione, uncertain for perhaps the first time in her young life and Hermione sighed. "Imogen," she said, "It's fine. He's your… Mr. Malfoy is an old friend."

"One your mother lost touch with," Draco said. "Or perhaps all the owls just went astray."

"They did not," Hermione said.

Imogen interrupted their brewing fight with a long and involved run down of the strengths and weaknesses of each House and which she thought she would be best suited for. Draco listened as though each word were water on the parched soil of his soul, and when Imogen concluded that she thought either Ravenclaw or Slytherin would be optimal, Hermione saw his throat bob with a convulsive little twitch and guilt began to gnaw at her.

"Which broom has your mother bought you?" Draco inquired, all courtesy, and that guilt grew as Imogen predictably announced that first years weren't permitted to have brooms and, besides, she didn't like flying.

"Well, if Hermione was your teacher, I'm not surprised," Draco said. "She never could fly worth a lick." Harry coughed and Draco glanced up at him. "You?" Draco asked. The fury and jealousy under his calm words would have ignited any fire. " _You_ were the one to try to teach my… teach this girl to fly?" He turned very slowly to Hermione and she had to brace herself to keep from shrinking back under the force of that glare. "How interesting," Draco said. "I hadn't taken you for quite that much of a… quite that vindictive."

"We parted badly," Hermione said, her own tone a warning. "I've never discussed any of our past with Imogen."

Draco turned back to his daughter. "Right," he said. "Imogen, what a beautiful name. Imogen Granger, I suppose?"

"Imogen Lyra Granger," the girl confirmed. "Lyra's a - "

"A constellation," Draco said. "I know." He closed his eyes for a moment and seemed to be trying to compose himself. When he opened them, they glinted a bit too much. "You gave her a constellation name, Hermione."

Hermione jerked her head up and down. "It… I thought it would make… it seemed right," she said. She'd spent months looking at names, writing down and crossing out star and constellation names until she'd been so angry she'd made holes in the paper with her quills. She hadn't even known why she was so angry, but when the nurse handed her the baby and asked her what the name was, she'd said Imogen Lyra without thinking and that had been that.

Draco collected himself. "Well, Imogen Lyra," he said, "I hope your mother will allow me to buy you a broom and see if I'm a bit better at flying lessons than Potter. He was a bit of a wild talent, so maybe breaking how to control a broom down for a beginner didn't come easily to him."

Imogen glanced at her mother and Hermione's fingers tightened on the ice cream she still had in her hand. The cone broke under the pressure and the treat, mostly melted by that point, slid down and landed in her lap. She swore and reached for a napkin but Draco had his wand out. "Let me," he said, and with a quick flick the mess was gone. Even her fingers weren't sticky any longer. "You've let me do so little," he said. "This would be the least - the very least - I could help you with."

"We parted badly," she said again.

"Not that badly," Draco said. "Nothing counts as that badly." He took an obvious breath. "So… broom shopping?"

Hermione wanted to say no. She wanted to say he was a curse, a bad idea that had had consequences she couldn't have anticipated, a man who'd never been able to so much as be polite except for one night he'd gone out of his way to try to make her regret. She wanted to tell him, as Harry had, to get bent, that no one wanted him here. Instead she said, "Not the newest Nimbus. That's too much for a child."

Draco sagged for the briefest of moments, then put an arrogant smirk on his face. "Not for this one," he said. "But we can start more slowly if you insist."

"Slow is good," Hermione said. "I can do slow." I think, she added in her mind. Maybe.

Draco looked at her for a long moment and, as those grey eyes studied her, she remembered why she'd allowed herself to follow him home all those years ago. "Then we'll do slow," he said. He held his hand out to Imogen. "Shall I spoil you with a broom?"

She put her book away and tucked her hand inside his. Hermione sat, frozen, until Draco turned to her and said, hope and resentment and anger and fear all warring in his tone, "Well, aren't you coming?" She sprang to her feet and took the arm Draco held out to her, half expecting him to yank it away and laugh at her for trusting him even the tiniest bit. Instead, as Harry watched bemusedly from the table, Draco led them both down the street and to the finest broom store in the whole of Diagon Alley, keeping a tale going of a horrible, possibly made up, mishap he'd had on a broom at eleven, coaxing a delighted laugh from Imogen and a tight smile from Hermione.

As he held the door for them both, Draco glanced down at her hand. "Still unmarried?" he asked at the sight of her ringless finger.

She nodded. Single mothers weren't a hot commodity on the dating market, and she had neither time nor interest to find someone who would be as much of a father as a partner. "I know a good place we could have dinner after we put her on the train," Draco said.

"Slowly," Hermione said in warning.

"You took eleven years from me," Draco said. "Let me… I will be a part of the rest, Hermione, like it or not. That means we will have to get along."

"We can have dinner after I put her on the train," Hermione conceded.

"After _we_ put her on the train," Draco corrected, one eye on the girl fingering expensive brooms with an awed look on her face.

"We," Hermione said. "Fine." Her mind seemed to have gone numb and she couldn't decide if she wished she hadn't picked that day to go shopping or whether she was glad he was taking this so well.

"Could you bring photo albums?" he asked. "If you have any?"

Hermione had to turn away from the expression on his face. "I'm sorry," she said. She thought of all the times she'd put a quill to paper and then just not sent the letter, not even put down words and regret joined the guilt eating at her. She had been unfair. "It was wrong not to tell - "

Draco set a hand on her shoulder and stopped her. "Just let me… let me _try_ ," he said. "I know you had reasons. I'm not… but let me - "

"I'll bring pictures," Hermione said. She took a deep breath. "Or you could come over and look through them all. There's more than I could possibly carry to a restaurant."

Draco Malfoy looked at her with raw gratitude before he sprang away to explain to his daughter that the broom she was eyeing was much too much for anyone but a professional athlete and she'd have to wait _at least_ until she was thirteen to have that one, but maybe this one over here would be a good broom to learn on, not some dinky thing meant for toddlers but not too much for a beginner either. Hermione watched the two blond heads together and swallowed against that lump in her throat that just wouldn't go away. This would be good, she told herself. She could foster a relationship between her daughter and her father and that would be all it would be. She almost had herself convinced of that when Draco waved her over, a smile on his mouth that made her heart do something odd in her chest.

She told herself she was just glad this was going well.

That was all it was.

Even when he slipped a hand around her waist, his fingers tentative as they rested above her hip, she insisted in the privacy of her mind that he was the father of her child. He'd be a good father, she could tell already. And that would be it. She'd never fall for Draco Malfoy. She wouldn't

Not ever.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you for all your lovely thoughts. I don't** **plan to ever expand the actual story - it really is a one shot - but I did do a bullet point outline of what it would be if I expanded it, which is on tumblr at colubrina DOT tumblr DOT com /post/149271194886/the-a-constellation-name-bullet-point-outline-ill**


	2. Expansion Sketch

_**this is an outline of an expansion I'll never write that I jotted down for coffeequeen73. it's been on tumblr for a while and I finally moved a copy over here.**_

 _ **. . . . . . . . . .**_

Hermione wasn't that drunk. What she was was angry. She and Ron had had another fight, and this one had been bad. They'd both screamed they were done and fine and FINE and stormed out. It wasn't the first time, and, if history was any guide, they'd both apologize the next day, but she was angry and reckless and she went to a pub and had one drink.

So she wasn't drunk.

Draco wasn't that drunk either, but it was easier to pretend afterward he'd been too intoxicated to make good decisions than admit angry, reckless Hermione was a turn on.

She talked about Ron, though, and he knew she was going to go back to the miserable bastard, knew this was a one night stand and nothing more, and so lashed out because he didn't want to be the one who cared more.

And she hadn't had any intention of it being more than one night. She was angry and wanted to twist the knife in Ron's gut as hard as she could and fucking Draco Malfoy seemed like a good way to do that.

When she realized she was pregnant, she and Ron broke up. Again. This time for good. Ron hadn't exactly spent the night of their big fight alone himself, so they were able to reconstruct a friendship, but raising Draco Malfoy's bastard child as his own was more than he could manage.

For eleven years Hermione stayed at the border of the Muggle and wizarding worlds, not wanting her child - who was really, really obviously Draco Malfoy's child - to be tarred and feathered with the Death Eater stigma she was sure had to follow him around. Imogen grew up with the Weaselys and Uncle Harry and other than that had almost no contact with the wizarding world.

When Draco realized Hermione had kept his child from him he was so angry he wanted to throttle her, and far more hurt than he expected. How could she think he'd do anything but love a child?

He briefly fantasized about fighting her for custody, using every resource his still very wealthy family had to take Imogen and never let Hermione see her again. He dropped the idea only because it would hurt Imogen and it had taken him .001 seconds upon seeing the girl to know he'd lie to the dark lord for her and kill anyone who tried to hurt her.

He understood his mother in a way he never had and sent her flowers 'Just Because.'

It took Imogen less than a minute to figure out Draco Malfoy was the father she had that no one liked to talk about. She eavesdropped on adult conversations a lot and knew most of the people in her small world hated her father and that her mother had avoided him for years. Whenever she and her mother had fought, she'd fantasized her father, who would be rich and look just like her and buy her anything she wanted, would swoop down and take her away.

Not that she really wanted to be taken away. She loved her mother dearly, but they did fight.

She wasn't at all sure what a Death Eater was. No one talked about the war. At all. Ever.

The first flying lesson did a lot to assuage Draco's jealousy. He wasn't sure he'd ever forgive Hermione for letting Potter - POTTER - teach his daughter to fly, but that the man had been right shite at it helped tremendously. Harry could fly, but he didn't have any idea how he did it, and hadn't been able to explain. Draco had the patience to explain and explain he did and by the end of the afternoon Imogen could sit a broom better than she had, and was flying cautiously to and fro behind the Manor.

Hermione almost had a panic attack when she walked in the door, and Draco cursed himself for forgetting she'd been tortured there. They'd had their night of lust at his flat, but it didn't have yards and there was no place for Imogen to fly there, so he'd brought her to the Manor.

The first week she was at school he bought a large house with a big yard so he could fly with her without Hermione having to go to the Manor.

Dinner after they put Imogen on the train is predictably tense. Hermione hands over photo albums and Draco looks through them in near silence as they eat the excellent food and drink the excellent vintage and try very hard to stay civil and adult.

They go back to her flat so he can see more photographs. He tries not to cry as he flips through page after page of her life, a life he wasn't allowed to share.

Hermione suggests he take them home with him so he can have copies made.

Imogen sends an owl home to her mother with her Sorting (Slytherin) and Hermione tells Draco when he returns the albums, copies made. She expresses concern that the girl will struggle in Slytherin because she's a half blood. Draco dismisses those fears. If anything she'd be likely to struggle because she's a Malfoy, not because she's a halfblood. There are lots of halfbloods in Slytherin. It's not like she's a - and he stops.

Hermione gets dangerously quiet. Not like she's a what, she asks.

You know what I mean, Draco says.

She suggests he leave.

He comes back the next day to apologize and try to explain. She screams at him that she gets it, he's still the same prejudiced arse he always was, that Muggle-borns (excuse her, mudbloods, and Draco flinches at the slur) are lesser beings. It's their first real fight since Draco and Imogen met and it's ugly. They're both smart and articulate and they say horrible, horrible things to one another.

They don't talk for two weeks.

Draco owls her to see if there are any restrictions on what he can get Imogen for Christmas.

Hermione responds that she's sure his judgement is fine.

He asks if he can see his daughter on Christmas.

It almost kills her to write it, but Hermione says he can spend Christmas with them if he wants to

He shows up the next day, apologizing again for the Muggle-born comment. She listens as he tries to explain his prejudice, and she hears him trying to understand it himself and it makes her really fucking tired because she doesn't see why she, as the minority, has to help the bigot understand his feelings, but he's Imogen's father so she grits her teeth and lets him talk. At one point he says, "I'm an arsehole, aren't I?" and she says, "Pretty much." He laughs at that, a kind of forlorn, lost laugh, and that chips another hole in the very thick wall between them. He asks if he could take her out for dinner again. He's so desperate to talk about Imogen. He wants every story. Hermione agrees and they meet for dinner.

Dinner becomes standing, weekly event. Draco can be charming when he wants to be, and he does. By Christmas, they're almost friends.

When they pick Imogen up at the train station she's taller, wearing makeup, and talking nonstop about Hogwarts. She loves Hogwarts. What she doesn't mention is that she's been cornered three times by people who sneer at her for being a Death Eater's daughter, or that she beat one of them up pretty badly.

Harry and Ron taught her to fight when she was nine, suggesting she just not mention it to her mother.

They had a feeling Hogwarts might be rough.

Draco has bought WAY too many presents. It's actually obscene how many gifts she has to open.

They go to the Weasley's for Christmas dinner.

It's awkward.

Molly, however, adores Imogen, and she's had mixed feelings about Hermione's decision to keep the girl a secret from her father, and now that Draco knows, Molly decides she has to be nice and she really tries.

It helps that Draco really can be charming when he wants to be and he's smart enough to know antagonizing the girl's surrogate extended family doesn't end well for him.

Molly proclaims him 'delightful' after three glasses of wine.

This is when Hermione and Draco find out she's been getting flack for the Death Eater thing. She retreated to the library and learned everything she could about Voldemort, the Death Eaters, and her father's involvement. She's good at research. She basically knows everything and she's outraged as only a child can be that he was considered anything but a victim. They overhear her berating Rose at length about how dare anyone condemn her father. Draco's touched and Ron laughs so hard he almost falls off his chair. She's just like her mother, he says. Remember SPEW?

By the time her first year is done, Draco and Hermione are fairly comfortably friends.

Lucius and Narcissa take to Imogen immediately. It helps that she looks exactly like Draco and these are people who value family above everything. They have a harder time accepting Hermione,and Lucius makes noises about adopting the girl and cutting Hermione out, but Draco derails him. She needs her mother, he says, and Narcissa takes his side and decides she will win Hermione over if it kills her because Hermione is the mother of her granddaughter. It isn't easy, and they aren't ever bffs, but eventually they have a civil, pleasant relationship.

Draco and Imogen have their first fight during the summer holiday. She's being a brat because she's a kid and she screams she hates him, that he can go away now, she doesn't need a father.

He goes white.

Hermione lights into her. That is not acceptable, young lady, and you will apologize right now. We do not speak to family like that.

Imogen stomps off to her room with every inch of stomping force only an almost-12-year-old can manage.

Family, Draco asks Hermione once the girl is gone.

Well, yes, she says. Obviously.

And that's when they kiss.

Then they have sex. The first bout is bad. REALLY bad. And they both lie there afterward waiting for the other person to say something nasty. At last Draco says he hopes she doesn't plan to judge him on that alone, and they laugh, and everything is okay.

Except it turns out they are REALLY fucking fertile with one another.

And she gets pregnant.

Ron laughs himself sick and Harry demands to know if she's ever heard of contraceptive charms.

Hermione is embarrassed and furious and happy because it's so different this time and she doesn't spent her whole pregnancy angry

Narcissa holds the baby (a boy: Scorpius James) during the wedding.


	3. Imogen Lyra Drabble

Imogen Lyra Malfoy-Granger leaned on the wooden rail of the stands and watched the Slytherin Quidditch team with a bit of a dreamy sigh. It wasn't that she cared about flying. Flying skills impressed her not at all. What she was watching was Paxton. One year above her in Slytherin, the quintessential bad boy and destined to be the father of her children, though he didn't know it yet. She knew he was a cliche with his dark eyes and dark hair and she didn't even care. He sat on his broom and yelled across the pitch at another player and she stared at how perfect he was and tried not to be too obvious about it.

Fortunately for her, every other girl lined up on the railing had eyes for the same thing, and none of them spared her a glance. Her ambitions regarding Paxton were not exactly unique.

"He's so good," one girl said with a breathy catch to her voice. "He'll be captain next year, I bet, even though he'll only be a fifth year."

Lyra nodded but didn't look away as the game ended and the Slytherin Chaser settled the ground. He shook his head and pushed his dark hair out of his eyes as he grinned at one of his fathers.

If Paxton looked good in his uniform, he looked even better when he flung himself down into the chairs in their common room and sucked on a quill as he worked on homework. He liked tight Muggle t-shirts and combat boots and she was thirteen years old, in her third year at Hogwarts, and not a child, so she knew things. She knew what she looked at and what she looked at was fine.

What she looked at also had no idea she existed and it wasn't _fair_. She was _thirteen_. **_THIRTEEN!_** She was practically an adult, and she knew she was in love, and this was the love that would last forever and ever, and that they were meant to be and they'd have a dozen babies and it would be amazing. He just had to, you know, notice she was alive.

Her parents had met at Hogwarts, after all. And Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny had too. _Everyone_ met the love of their life at Hogwarts. It was practically a _rule_.

Not that she liked rules that much, but that was not the point. The point was she and Paxton Wood were meant to be together and all she had to do was get him to realize it.

"Paxton." She could hear his father even from where she stood. The wind must be carrying their voices just right and she strained to eavesdrop. "Good game, but if you don't watch yourself out there, you'll break your hand, and then what?"

"Dad," Paxton hissed. "Shut up. No one knows about that."

"If you can't play, your father will have my head," Marcus Flint said. "Just… be careful, okay? I'd hate for all your hard work to be ruined because a bludger got you."

The wind shifted, and Lyra couldn't hear what he said to that. Paxton, as usual, didn't notice her smiling at him in the Common Room, and didn't notice her smiling at him on the train, and then she was home for the winter holiday and slouched in front of her favorite dinner as her parents tried to ask questions about school and classes and she answered in monosyllables and she knew it was rude but she didn't care. She wouldn't see Paxton for the whole holiday, and he didn't know she was alive, and everything was horrible.

 _Horrible_.

"Lyra," her father said as he tucked her in that night and brushed her hair off her face. "If something's bothering you, you can tell me."

It wasn't as if he would understand because adults didn't know _anything_ , but she scowled and said, "He hates me."

"Who hates you?" Draco Malfoy's voice got dangerously quiet but she didn't notice.

"Paxton Wood," she said. "He's perfect and smart and good at Quidditch and he hates me. He smiled at that stupid Posy and he borrowed a quill from Muriel, and he sat with Cassie and that horrible Rosetta on the train, but he's never even said hullo to me." She sniffled and then she was crying and her father sat with the stiff posture he got when he had no idea what to do.

"Paxton Wood," he said slowly as he placed the boy she met. "Marcus' son?"

She nodded and took the handkerchief he handed her to blow her nose. "And he's going to play some game over the holiday, and his father was all worried he'd break his hand or something, which doesn't even make sense, and I can't even go!" she wailed.

Her father, for some reason, began to laugh. "I think I can get you tickets," he said. "But, if I remember what Marcus said the last time we met, it's not Quidditch you'll be seeing."

She sniffled again. "What is it?"

"How do you feel about classical piano?" her father asked.

. . . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N - A Lyra Imogen ficlet for ktbeh. Happy very early birthday!_**


	4. Imogen and Paxton Drabble

Imogen clutched the bouquet in her hands. It was so embarrassing. Who brought flowers to a boy? She'd been sure her father had to be insane, or teasing her. Even her mother's sigh and agreement that it was expected to bring flowers hadn't reassured her. Only the sight of how many other people had bunches of flowers in their hands, some far larger than hers, made her decide her parent's might not have been completely wrong.

Of course, they had bought tickets right next to Paxton's fathers, which was the absolute worst. Her mum had stayed home with Scorpius, who was teething or going through a growth spurt or gassy or something. All the things looked the same to her: he drooled and screamed. Baby brothers were overrated. Not like Paxton, who was perfect. He had perfect teeth and perfect clothes and a perfect smile and she was going to absolutely die sitting next to his fathers and having to answer questions about did they know each other from school and did she play Quidditch?

She did not play Quidditch. She watched Quidditch. Mostly she watched Paxton, who didn't see her because she was just another girl, just like all the other girls who thought he was perfect. Except she was sitting here with his fathers after Paxton's piano concert and she was going to die before the bulk of the audience filtered out and he changed out of his dress robes and came out to meet them.

"I thought we'd go out for ice cream," Mr. Flint said. "Fortescue's might be a bit crowded but -."

"We'll sit in the back," Mr. Wood said. He smiled at her and she turned red. Was it worse that his fathers thought this was some kind of date to would it have been worse to sit with them? She couldn't decide, and before she could do more than notice how awful Mr. Flint's teeth were - Paxton had gotten lucky there - the most sought after boy in Slytherin had appeared, leather jacket back on.

He looked at his fathers, looked at her, and turned bright red.

She thrust the bouquet toward him like a shield. "You sounded great," she tried to say. Her mouth was so dry it came out half garbled and this was the worst thing ever. He glowered at his fathers and she realized the last thing he'd wanted was for anyone from school to know. Playing Quidditch was cool. Piano wasn't.

She held the flowers out and she could hear her heart pounding in her ears when a long moment went by and he didn't take them. "Paxton," Mr. Wood said in a tone that made this as bad as it could possibly be. "You know Mr. Malfoy's daughter, Imogen." That drove Paxton to snatch the bouquet. He held it even more awkwardly than she had.

"God," he muttered so only she could hear. "Parents are the worst."

"Right?" she asked.

He took a step closer to her as though if he separated far enough from the two men beaming at him with pride other people might not know he was with them. "Thanks for the flowers," he said.

"They're taking us all out for ice cream," she said. She wasn't sure if she was warning him or hoping he'd look pleased.

"We won't sit with you," her own father said. He sounded amused, the betraying monster. "I'm sure you'd prefer your own space."

They did. Imogen asked about the songs, and how long he'd been playing, and he mumbled since he'd been too little to reach the pedals, and she told him he sounded great. "No," she said when he looked like he didn't believe her. "You really did."

"Don't tell," he said.

"I won't," she said. Having a secret with Paxton Wood was the most thrilling thing that had ever happened to her. It was better than the time she'd beat the Ravenclaw up for telling her her father should be in jail. It was better than the first time she'd really flown on a broom. The secret's place on the list of the best things in her life didn't last, though, because he grabbed at her hand and held it for the rest of the time they were eating their ice cream.

She thought nothing would ever get better than that until she heard him hiss to his fathers on the way out, "I can't believe I told you I had a crush on her and you went and asked her to my piano concert. I am never telling you anything ever again."

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to ktbeh for encouraging me to write more in this universe.**


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